Tagged With factories

Video: We were totally wrong in assuming that chain link fences were made by a warehouse full of people tirelessly bending wires with pliers. It turns out this giant machine does it all autonomously, bending, twisting and weaving wires like it's making a giant metal jumper you never want to wear.

Video: The best feature of this elaborate LEGO Mindstorms miniature factory is how utterly useless it is in the grand scheme of things. As its name implies, the Papercube spends about three minutes diligently performing just a single task: Making a tiny folded paper cube.

A river near an industrial town in Russia has turned suddenly blood-red. But it's not an omen of something mystical wrong in the cosmos. Rather, the source of the problem is probably a leaky factory upstream.

Video: The making of a record isn't exactly a big mystery but there's still a bit of old magic in seeing music get put to wax in a factory where the metal gets etched and the vinyl gets stamped out. Super Deluxe took its stoned mode camera into one of these vinyl stamping factories and recorded all the good stuff. Sometimes it looks like they're making Captain America's shield and other times it looks like they're mixing paint dye, but they're all steps into giving the world better sounding music.

Video: Of all the objects you use on a daily basis, you've probably never stopped to wonder how plastic drinking straws came to be. But if you like complicated machines that are simultaneously extruding, cutting and sorting, you'll be more than satisfied with the high-speed process behind making two-toned plastic drinking straws.

Video: Bollman Hat Company, located in Adamstown, Pennsylvania, is America's oldest hat factory. It first opened in 1868 and its machines are decades old and that all makes for a fascinating place with so much history. It's really cool to see how the machines work since they all have their own specific tasks and weird way of accomplishing them. Hypebeast took a tour of the factory, which you can watch below.

Apple has banned "bonded servitude", which means it won't let its supplier factories make their new hires work for free to pay for the costs of hiring them. Good! Also: Why the hell is this just happening now?

The Korea Herald reports that two workers have died and four been injured during a nitrogen leak at an LG Display factory in the South Korean city of Paju. The incident occurred while the workers carried out regular repairs on the ninth floor of the factory, which sits 40km north of Seoul.

In a factory that once made floppy disks, herbs are growing. Inside an old semiconductor factory, there's lettuce taking root. Oddly enough, electronics factories make great farms. And Toshiba, Sony and Panasonic are swapping industrial infrastructure for a business that's as old as civilisation itself.

Speculation for months about where Tesla would make the batteries to power its Model 3 EV electric vehicles has finally ended, with confirmation today that Elon Musk has decided where to erect his Gigafactory. The big winner? Nevada.

When you walk into the Shapeways headquarters in a sprawling New York City warehouse building, it doesn't feel like a factory. It's something different, somehow unforgettable, inevitably new. As it should be. This is one of the world's first full service 3D-printing factories, and it's not like any factory I've ever seen.

Remember those floating chairs that our uber-lazy future offspring rode around on in the movie Wall-E? Chevrolet just installed the real-life version in two of its assembly lines. Meet the fully automated, gesture-controlled Ergo-Chair.

My, my, my how the tables have turned. The past few years have seen countless human jobs filled with our less-whiny robot counterparts. But it turns out that, at least for Toyota, the pros of total automation haven't outweighed the cons. Meaning human factory workers are back in business.

Wires are some of the most basic components of the modern world, which practically guarantees that most of us take them for granted. But as English Russia so kindly shows us, the process behind our messy heaps of wiring is anything but ordinary.

America's industrial revolution was woven on looms and spun on spools, but it's been decades since the textile industry began declining. Chis Payne, an architect-turned-photographer, began shooting US textile factories in 2010. He's kept it up, too, amassing a visual diary of a changing industry.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google and Foxconn are working together to create a new vision of roboticised factories. According to the WSJ article, he recently met with Foxconn CEO Terry Gou "to speed up deployment" of Google's grand plans within the Taiwanese company's factories.

Greg White has shot some of the most remote and unusual places in the world. The UK photographer has published photo essays on Chernobyl, Svalbard, and even CERN. But for his latest project, he discovered an alien world within the ordinary confines of his home country: The labs where satellites are built.

A report from New York-based China Labor Watch has raised concerns over a new wave of worker abuse among Apple suppliers. While Cook and co attempt to shift some of their manufacturing load from Foxconn — which has drawn its own share of criticism for worker abuse — it seems it can't leave behind poor working conditions, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Robots have ruled industrial production for decades in many fields, from the auto industry to food processing and consumer electronics. The Singularity isn't here yet — but in the world of manufacturing, it's been knocking on the door for years.